Five million couples who lost their married couples’ allowance last year won’t benefit from the

“Five million couples who lost their married couples’ allowance last year won’t benefit from the new credit at all.”He killed off the married couples’ allowance before he had a replacement ready and now his new system is so full of holes that he is already planning its successor.”Mr Hague also attacked spending promises for health and education. He said: “When will the Government understand that an announcement of that kind is not enough to repair the morale of teachers, nurses, doctors and police officers so cruelly undermined over the last few years.”Why didn’t they say to people in public services that the Government would get off their backs? There is no point spending one day a year making helpful sounding announcements if they spend the other 364 days piling on extra regulations and extra bureaucracy.”Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat Leader, attacked Mr Hague’s “diatribe”, but accused Mr Brown of “poverty of ambition”.He said: “The Chancellor is behaving like a politician. He has certainly behaved like the chairman of the Labour general election campaign, there’s no doubt about that.”Of the expenditure that has been announced today, the Chancellor is devoting five times as much financial priority to tax reductions than he has to investment in health and education, that’s the truth of the matter, and that comes on the back of a four-year parliament with a colossal Parliamentary majority, where for the first part of that parliament he stuck to Conservative spending plans which his predecessor was just saying in an interview the other day, that he would not have stuck to.”Because of that we have had consistent underfunding in vital public services.”He said the budget had done nothing to help farmers or the countryside, had done nothing to cut student tuition fees and failed to help pensions in need of long-term care. He pointed out rises in secondary school class sizes, increasing crime and record winter deaths among pensioners.”That is the backdrop, and that is the context against which this budget and the looming general election should be judged.”Sally Keeble, Labour MP for Northampton North, speaking at the start of the Budget debate, praised the benefits for women.

She said: “The Liberal Democrats have tried to depict this as purely a tax cutting Budget, instead of looking at the very tangible benefits it provides. To me the issues are that it redistributes wealth and it redistributes wealth in part from the wallet to the purse.”Sir Michael Spicer, Conservative MP for West Worcestershire, said the budget would rule out cuts in interest rates.Labour leftwinger Diane Abbott, MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, warned of a very old fashioned distinction between deserving and undeserving poor in Labour thinking.She said: “A Victorian distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor embedded in this system of tax credits does not reflect well on a 21st century Labour Government.”Ken Purchase, Labour MP for Wolverhampton North East, said: “The people of this country will have seen successive budgets played out in this place, benefiting a huge number of people, not just a few people, not just many people, but it seems to me the whole of the country has benefited from the Chancellor’s stewardship.”. Ah, the rich get richer and the poor get hand-outs. What is a neo-liberal Chancellor, even one with a fully functioning social conscience, to do? Nothing but tinker at the edges. On the one hand, Mr Brown tries in small ways to help those living in absolute vulnerability. On the other, he relentlessly stokes the excesses of those who work hard and reap large rewards in their efforts to help those who do no work at all, the dear old shareholders

Ah, the rich get richer and the poor get hand-outs. What is a neo-liberal Chancellor, even one with a fully functioning social conscience, to do? Nothing but tinker at the edges.

On the one hand, Mr Brown tries in small ways to help those living in absolute vulnerability. On the other, he relentlessly stokes the excesses of those who work hard and reap large rewards in their efforts to help those who do no work at all, the dear old shareholders.
There can be no doubt that Mr Brown steers this course fantastically well His latest Budget is, under the circumstances, impeccable. But in his varied initiatives can be read the story of the grave contradictions within our economy. Once, those contradictions were played out in the cycle of boom and bust. It is Mr Brown’s justifiably proud boast that he has banished that cycle How does he do it?The answer is simple. He presides over an economy in which boom and bust live side by side. While some parts of the country struggle with the troubles brought by prosperity, others contend with the problems of old-fashioned recession.

One is tempted to point out that if neo-liberalism is eventually going to make the whole world rich, it is a bit baffling that, even among the people of these isles, that simply isn’t happening. Labour may have tried to insist that the North-South divide is a fiction. But Mr Brown acknowledges the truth – that it is becoming stronger – in his announcement of investment in Regional Development Agencies to combat the drift whereby “too many people and places are left behind”.This is the sort of social engineering that we’re told neo-liberalism has abolished, and, indeed, in all of the sections of the Budget that concern themselves with social engineering, the paradoxes inherent in promoting wealth while also promoting prudence loom large. Mr Brown’s economy is stable in much the same manner as a hamster’s wheel is stable. It may not fall over but, unlinked to any further motor, it does not achieve a great deal either.In this Budget, boom and bust can be seen living side by side in two sets of initiatives that are laudable when they are taken on their own merits, but that are both products of, and contributors to, the vicious little hamster circle.The first is the raft of initiatives that are designed to help the deserving poor. The child tax credit, the pensioner credit, the disabled tax credit and all the initiatives directed at helping the parents of young children are positive developments. But they are also clear acknowledgments that this land of plenty is also a land of need.

Those people need help, but so do many others on low wages in parts of the country where the cost of living is dizzyingly high.The most visible problem caused by earning a modest wage in a wealthy economy is the Southern housing crisis. In his tax breaks for conversions of unused flats, Mr Brown again acknowledges the problem. But his tax credits creep only a little way towards offering a solution.The second set of initiatives concerns the setting-aside of money to recruit nurses and teachers – £135m for the recruitment of nurses and £200m for the recruitment and retention of teachers. Again, these shortages are causing most chaos in the boom areas, where the cost of living is high and the prosperity crisis is biting deep. But while teachers and nurses are certainly deserving, they’re not the only workers who find themselves unable to live on their salaries.On the bus yesterday, I saw the usual sign exhorting passengers to change seats and sit, instead, in the nice big one with the steering-wheel. Written on it in Biro were several telling details of the job in question: “No sick pay”; “£4.70 an hour”; “10-hour shifts”; “Take home £250 for a 65-hour week”.Though I’d be the first to admit that you can’t believe everything you read in graffiti, the spirit of the defacement suggests that the shortage of bus drivers, just like the shortage of nurses and teachers, is due to more than limited recruitment initiatives.